Since April 15, 2023, a brutal civil war in Sudan has killed an estimated 20,000 people and injured 33,000. The ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is centralized in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum and the Darfur region.
Former President and Military Officer Omar Al-Bashir ruled Sudan for 30 years, from 1989 to 2019. Authoritarian control and widespread repression marked his regime during that period. Al-Bashir’s rule relied on controlling Sudan’s two main centers of military power: the military and the Janjaweed militia which later became the RSF. These militias helped Al-Bashir suppress rebels in the Darfur region during the 2003 war. The United Nations (UN) accused them of committing genocide in 2005.
In 2019, after sustained civilian protests, the RSF and SAF deposed al-Bashir and installed civilian prime minister Abdallah Hamdok. In turn, Hamdok promised to bring Sudan towards democracy. However, in 2021, the military and the RSF staged the second coup in four years. They overthrew the civilian government after Hamdok signaled that he would hold them accountable for their crimes on behalf of al-Bashir, and agreed to share power.
In 2023, the power-sharing agreement between the military and the RSF failed. The former allies then turned on one another, starting the current war.
“It’s a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable proportions,” Leni Kinzli, a senior World Food Programme official in Port Sudan said in an interview with The Urban Legend. “Half [of Sudan’s] population is facing hunger. That’s 25 million people, which is a population the size of Australia. And of those, around 8 million people are in levels where they are barely having a meal a day and are literally on the brink of starvation.”
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristoff and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, conditions in Darfur and other parts of the country resemble those during the 2003 war.
Dr. Gerrit Kurtz is a researcher with The Institute for International Security Affairs, a think tank employed by the German government. In an April 4th, 2024 report on the current war, he wrote, “Massacres are being carried out [in Darfur] and targeted violence is being used against ethnic groups.”
In the past few months, supplies of weapons and funds for the combatants from outside Sudan have persisted and attempts at negotiation have mostly failed. “There needs to be much more attention on the supply of weapons to the SAF and the RSF,” Kinzli said. “[Sudan has] generally been pretty ignored [by the international community]. There wasn’t a single visit from a high-ranking American diplomat to Sudan to speak directly to any of the generals on the SAF side or the other side.”
The Urban Legend reached out to the United States State Department to ask whether they will apply any pressure on U.S. allies, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who supply weapons to both sides. We also inquired if the U.S. was considering any measures beyond supplying aid to alleviate suffering. The State Department declined to comment.
Meanwhile, in Sudan, conditions on the ground continue to deteriorate. According to Kinzli, the World Food Programme and other aid agencies can no longer provide aid to the hardest-hit areas of Darfur. “It’s impossible to get aid [into those regions] because we can’t have aid trucks driving through where bombs are flying,” she said. “There is no longer any internet to Darfur; no longer imports of medicine. It’s just cut off.”
The Urban Legend conducted a poll of 26 students with a margin of error of 10%, finding that only half were aware of the crisis in Sudan. “I scroll through social media and I see things about Gaza, about sports, about elections,” Rodney Williams ’28 said. “I never see anything about Sudan.”
The lack of awareness about the crisis in Sudan is not limited to Urban. Other conflicts seem to attract more attention and interest from international news in general. This can partly be attributed to the lack of international reporters who can enter the country. “There definitely is a crisis of coverage,” Kinzli said. “There’s an incredibly complicated history that reporters find really hard to explain and readers find really hard to understand.”
